I'm a mostly unknown and a pretend journalist now, but there was a time when I hoped I was close to breaking the story of the century. It started at church.
Where I go to church each Sunday, they round up all the old guys and let them talk and pretend to listen to each other for nearly an hour. A discussion might start with a basic concept like faith and progress to a detailed debate about shooting bears while in your pajamas. And in this case, I do mean bears wearing your pajamas. Without someone guiding the discussion, the potential scope of such an exchange could be and often is unlimited and baffling.
One Sunday, a particular man very matter-of-factly announced during one such discussion that he has seen many UFOs. He had often watched them behind his house.
The guy was a quiet sort, who had not previously ever said crazy things, so I took an interest. I worked for the local newspaper at the time in Maine and we rarely had UFO stories with a good local angle in the paper. It was a rural area and it was like we couldn't afford to have the delusions people in the big city got to enjoy on a regular basis.
"Next time you see a UFO behind your house, would you tell me?" I asked.
"Sure," he said, like we had just been talking about backyard robin sightings.
It was a couple of weeks later that I got a phone call.
"Yeah, Steve, you asked me to tell you about it if I saw a UFO again? Well I'm watching one now."
I got his address, grabbed a camera and told my wife I was off to do a story on a UFO invasion. My wife was fine with that and didn't even question me about what I had said.
(That might be because I tend to say strange things to my family just before I leave, all the time. I deliberately say bizarre things so that if I die, they will have a good story to tell. They can stand up at my funeral and say something like this: "I'll never forget the last words my Dad said to me. He said, 'Remember the only difference between a mud puddle and a geyser is that if you step in a mud puddle, you don't get third-degree burns like you do when you step in a geyser.'" And everyone will spend the rest of the funeral trying to figure out what that meant.)
As I went out the door, I didn't really expect I was about to see a UFO, but I couldn't help but think about how cool it would be to be the first reporter ever to get clear, focused backyard pictures of a flying saucer.
The guy didn't live in a rural location.He lived in a regular suburban neighborhood, which seemed suspicious because one would think if E.T. really was exploring his backyard, other people would have to notice. And yet, as I drove over with my window rolled down, I kept looking to the sky wondering if I, too, might see something speeding away or at least spot a glowing weather balloon.
When I arrived, he greeted me very pleasantly and guided me through his house to a waiting telescope. When we got there he told me the telescope was focused on what would at first appear to be a star. If I watched long enough, however, I would see the image begin to jump around in the lens, moving in erratic patterns that would lead me to the obvious conclusion that I was watching a confused alien life form.
I was disappointed that this was not the kind of backyard UFO that I could run up to and ask to hover for a minute while I took a photo. When I watched the star through the lens, I soon realized that this was just an optical illusion. If you sat there staring at this one tiny star long enough, it did look it was moving about but it was clearly no UFO.
After several minutes of telescope disappointment, I told my friend that I didn't think this constituted a UFO sighting, but was nothing more than an optical illusion.
"Oh," he said.
That was it. No push back. No apologies. He didn't say, "I feel so embarrassed that I thought I was watching a UFO."
It was just a simple, "Oh." And he was ready to move on to a new chapter in his life.
I told this story to another friend of mine sometime later and he told me his own UFO story, only this one was more movie-like with something rising up on the side of the road and shooting off into the sky. I feel cheated that I have never witnessed such a thing.
I can't call myself a believer, but I think it would be cool if someone brought home a Big Foot and introduced it to space aliens in their backyard who came here from a planet where Elvis really is king. But then, I've always liked stories about such things in the newspaper and look forward to the kind of discussion we'd have if a flying saucer sank in someone's swimming pool or if someone dressed up a Big Foot and took him to a Rotary meeting.
If it weren't for wild, unbelievable stories about UFOs, Sasquatches, government programs that work and fact-based talk radio, the newspaper would be full of just very serious sad stories. Perhaps this column will bring me in touch with someone else who has UFOs in their backyard or a baby Loch Ness Monster in their bathtub. I may not ever write about it in the newspaper, but it will give me something to talk about at church.
Even though Steve Eaton spent several years in the news business, his attempts to break a big UFO story never bore fruit. Now he toils in obscurity in Cache Valley, where the people can't afford UFO sightings and it is too cold for Sasquatch.